LossLess Group
Technology and efficiency
There is something uncomfortable about many technology projects: the technology works perfectly but still creates very little value. RFID is no exception.
A hotel can install readers at every relevant location, encode thousands of textiles and create a remarkably accurate record of their movements. However, each time an employee has to stop, open an application, press a button or perform an additional scan simply to feed the system, we should ask the question: Who is working for whom?
Hotels don’t make money scanning towels. Housekeeping teams create value by preparing rooms efficiently and maintaining the standards guests expect, laundry teams create value by processing textiles. Technology should support those activities with as little interference as possible.
This sounds obvious, but it has important implications for how connected-textile systems are designed.
Time counts
Imagine two ways of controlling a housekeeping pantry. In the first, every time an employee takes clean linen, each movement has to be registered through a deliberate action. The resulting information may be excellent, but the hotel has introduced another task into an already busy operation.
In the second, the normal movement of textiles generates most of the information automatically. The data may ultimately look similar, the operational cost does not.
Small additional tasks become surprisingly large when multiplied across a hotel. Thirty seconds does not sound significant until it happens hundreds of times a day, across dozens of employees, 365 days a year. This is why automation should not simply mean replacing a manual count with a faster electronic count that still involves the employee.
Automation
If textiles identify themselves as they naturally move through the operation, the employee increasingly disappears from the data-collection process. A trolley passes through a doorway, linen leaves for the laundry, clean stock returns, articles enter or leave a pantry. The physical process itself creates the digital record.
Of course, complete automation is neither possible nor necessarily desirable. There will always be exceptions, damaged articles, unusual movements and situations requiring human intervention. But human attention should be concentrated on those exceptions, not consumed by recording normality.
There is another reason this matters. Every additional manual step is also an opportunity for the information to become incomplete. People forget, shifts become busy, procedures are followed differently by different employees. A system that requires perfect human discipline to produce reliable information will eventually discover that hotels are populated by human beings.
Unobtrusive
Good technology should be designed around that reality. The best connected-textile operation may therefore not be the one with the most readers, the most screens or the most impressive scanning procedure. It may be the one employees barely notice.
Textiles move as they always have. Housekeeping works as it always did. Laundry collections and deliveries continue.
But quietly, in the background, the operation becomes measurable. That should be the objective. Because the purpose of technology is not to create more work in order to generate better data.
The purpose is to generate better data so people can do less unnecessary work.
Measuring to know
Hotels have become extraordinarily good at measuring things. A General Manager knows yesterday’s occupancy, ADR and RevPAR almost instantly. Revenue management systems forecast demand weeks ahead. Labour productivity, energy consumption, food costs and guest satisfaction are measured continuously, compared with targets and used to make decisions.
Measuring vs. guessing
Now ask a deceptively simple question: How much linen does the hotel actually need? The answer is often much less precise. There will be an agreed PAR level, Procurement knows what has been purchased or the laundry how much rental stock has been allocated to the property. From experience, housekeeping has a pretty good idea how much is required to get through a busy day. Periodic inventories may provide another reference point.
However, none of these necessarily answers the question. And importantly, whether the hotel owns or rents its linen makes surprisingly little difference. What the hotel really needs to understand is whether there is enough linen available to support its operation efficiently.
Some linen is in guestrooms or in housekeeping pantries. Other linen is waiting for collection, is being wahed or travelling back from the laundry. Articles may have been damaged, have disappeared from circulation or are simply sitting somewhere it is not currently needed.
As a result, a hotel can have more than sufficient linen in circulation but still experience shortages. It can also have far more linen than it really needs and never experience a shortage at all. The second situation is much harder to notice.
If linen is hotel-owned, excessive inventory means unnecessary capital sitting in cupboards, storerooms and laundry circulation. If it is rented, the cost is less visible but still very real. The hotel ultimately pays for the stock dedicated to servicing its operation, including the excess stock required to compensate for inefficient circulation. Therefore, the question “How many pieces do we have?” is useful, but insufficient.
Guessing vs. data
The more interesting questions are: How much do we actually consume, how quickly does linen return from the laundry, how much buffer do we need, which articles disappear faster than expected and how does occupancy affect requirements? Perhaps most importantly, how much stock is necessary to maintain availability without paying for inventory the operation does not really need?
Historically, answering those questions accurately was difficult. Textiles move constantly, in enormous quantities, between multiple locations. Measuring that movement manually requires considerable effort, which is why hotels quite reasonably developed PAR levels, periodic stocktakes and experienced-based rules to manage it.
Data is knowing
But hospitality has gone through exactly the same transition in many other areas. Revenue management moved from historical averages and intuition towards live information and forecasting. Energy management became increasingly measurable. Food purchasing became connected to consumption. Labour planning became connected to occupancy.
In each case, better information didn’t replace the experience of hotel professionals. It made that experience more useful. Textiles are beginning to follow the same path. The objective is not to know, with obsessive precision, that the hotel has 4,837 bath towels at 10:32 on Tuesday morning.
The objective is knowing whether it has the right amount of bath towels to meet demand efficiently, today and in the weeks ahead. That is a very different question.
For an industry that can forecast how many rooms it expects to sell next Tuesday, perhaps knowing how much linen those rooms will require should not be such a radical idea.
Invoice calculation
Laundry invoices are usually quite straightforward. A price is agreed per kilogram, per piece or per article type. The laundry records the volume processed, applies the tariff and sends the invoice. Finance checks that the multiplication is correct and, assuming everything matches, the invoice is approved.
It may be perfectly accurate but still not tell the hotel whether it is paying the right amount. The distinction is important because there are really two different questions.
Invoice questions
The first is an accounting question: has the laundry correctly charged the agreed price for the quantity it says it processed? The second is an operational question: should that quantity have been processed in the first place? Those are not the same thing.
Imagine a hotel whose laundry invoice increases by 8% over a year. Every invoice may be mathematically correct. The agreed price has not changed and every kilogram has been billed at exactly the contractual rate. But why has the volume increased? Perhaps occupancy increased by 8%, in which case there may be no problem at all.
Or perhaps the hotel is washing more textiles per occupied room. Perhaps rejection and rewash levels have risen. Maybe linen is being returned unnecessarily to the laundry because operational procedures have changed. Maybe the textile mix is different or the billed volumes simply do not reconcile particularly well with what the hotel believes it actually sent out for laundry.
The economics
The invoice alone cannot tell us. This becomes even more relevant in rental models. When the laundry owns the linen, hotels may understandably assume that responsibility for textile control belongs to the supplier. However, the hotel still pays for the service, and inefficient circulation eventually appears in the economics of that service.
If more linen is processed than necessary, the hotel pays for it. If rewash rates are excessive, somebody pays for the additional cycle. If poor turnaround requires more circulating stock, the cost of that additional inventory is ultimately embedded in the commercial model.
Ownership of the textiles does not remove the hotel’s interest in understanding what is happening to it. None of this means the laundry invoice should be approached with suspicion. In fact, better information should make invoice discussions considerably less adversarial.
Mutual benefit
If both hotel and laundry can see what left the property and arrived at the laundry, what was returned clean or rejected and how volumes evolved relative to occupancy, the monthly conversation becomes much easier. Most invoices will probably be confirmed without discussion. The exceptions become visible precisely because the normal process is transparent.
And there is another benefit: invoice control stops being only about finding billing errors. It becomes a way of understanding the operation. Why did towel processing increase this month? Why are sheets rewashed more frequently? Why is one property using considerably more linen per occupied room than another? Why did laundry cost rise while occupancy remained flat?
Those questions are far more valuable than checking whether €1.42 multiplied by 8,350 kilograms produces the correct total. A laundry invoice tells us what the service cost. Good textile management should also help explain why it cost that much.
An invoice can be completely accurate and still contain an operational problem worth investigating.
The PAR reality
Ask how much linen a hotel needs and sooner or later somebody will mention PAR. Four PAR, five PAR. The number varies, but the underlying idea is remarkably persistent: take the theoretical requirement to service the hotel once, multiply it by an agreed number, and you have approximately the amount of linen required to operate safely.
It is a useful rule of thumb but nothing more. Consider two identical 300-room hotels. The first has average occupancy of 70%, guests typically stay several nights and its laundry consistently returns clean linen within 24 hours. The second operates at 90%, has a high proportion of short stays and its laundry cycle frequently takes 48 hours. Why would both hotels need the same PAR?
Ownership vs. rental
The same question applies whether the hotel owns its textiles or rents them. In an owned-linen model, excessive PAR means capital tied up in unnecessary inventory. In a rental model, the financial mechanism is different, but the underlying inefficiency remains.
If more linen has to be purchased, financed, stored, transported and processed to maintain the same level of availability, that cost does not disappear simply because the textiles sit on somebody else’s balance sheet.
Dynamic requirements
Perhaps the more interesting problem with PAR is that it tends to treat linen requirements as static when hotel operations are anything but: variable occupancy, seasonality changes, laundry turnaround inefficiency, guest behaviour. Textile losses fluctuate, some articles are changed every day while others are used much less frequently.
A bath towel and a duvet cover do not necessarily require the same circulating buffer simply because they happen to belong to the same room. Yet it is common to apply one PAR philosophy across an entire textile inventory.
Problem or solution
The danger is that PAR becomes the answer to problems it does not cause. If linen repeatedly runs short, increasing PAR is an obvious solution, and sometimes the correct one. However, the hotel may have enough linen on site but it sits in the wrong place. Perhaps laundry turnaround has deteriorated, losses have increased or housekeeping pantries are accumulating unnecessary buffers.
Adding another half PAR may make the shortage disappear. It may also make the underlying problem disappear from view. The objective should not be to operate with the lowest possible PAR. Laundry trucks arrive late, occupancy exceeds forecasts and operations rarely behave exactly as planned. Hotels need resilience and the objective is to understand how much linen an operation actually needs.
From assumption to evidence
Today we can increasingly measure the variables that determine the correct PAR: occupancy, consumption, circulation time, losses, available stock and laundry turnaround. When doing so, PAR no longer needs to be an assumption imposed on the operation. It becomes a reality the operation itself tells us.
One hotel may discover that 3.2 PAR provides a perfectly comfortable buffer for a particular article. Another hotel may genuinely need 4.5 PAR to operate efficiently. Even within the same hotel, the appropriate level may differ by textile type or change during different periods of the year.
Conclusion
Four PAR was never a bad idea. It provided a simple answer to a complicated question when much of the information required to answer it properly was unavailable. But today the more useful question is no longer: “How much PAR should we have?” It is: “How much linen do we actually need, and why?”
It’s the difference between applying a rule and managing an operation.
Technology
RFID is an extraordinarily useful technology. Attach a small UHF chip to a textile item and suddenly something that was previously almost anonymous can be identified individually, quickly and without direct line of sight. Hundreds of articles can be detected in seconds. Movements that once required manual counting can become visible almost automatically.
It is tempting, therefore, to think that installing RFID solves the linen-management problem. It doesn’t. RFID solves a much narrower problem: it gives the textile item an identity and allows us to observe it. What we do with that information is a different question.
Provider of evidence
Imagine a hotel that can now see that 3,842 bath towels are in circulation. That is certainly better than not knowing. But is 3,842 the right number? Is it too many? Too few? How many will the hotel need next month? How quickly are towels disappearing? Is slow laundry turnaround increasing the amount of stock required? Are some articles sitting unused? When should replacements be ordered?
The RFID chip cannot answer any of those questions. It provides the evidence from which answers can be built. This distinction matters because technology projects have a tendency to focus on what the technology can measure rather than on what the operation needs to improve.
Questions are answered
An RFID scanning portal can tell us that 600 sheets left the hotel this morning. Useful. But the management question might be whether 600 sheets should have left. The same scanner can identify that 580 came back the next day. Useful again. But now we need to understand whether the remaining 20 are delayed, missing, rejected, still at the laundry or have simply not been detected.
If the laundry consistently returns linen more slowly than expected, the important consequence may not be the missing detection at all. It may be that the hotel needs more inventory in circulation, and will be paying for it. This is where RFID tracking and textile management begin to separate. Tracking asks: where and when was this textile item seen? Management asks: What does what we are seeing mean, and what should we do about it?
Recognize its limitations
There is another reality worth acknowledging: RFID itself is not perfect. Chips fail, scans are missed, some existing linen may remain untagged when new stock enters the operation. Also, people do not always follow processes exactly as designed. Hotels and laundries are real operational environments, not laboratories.
A useful textile-management system cannot, and should not, depend on every textile item being read perfectly each time. It needs to understand incomplete information, recognize anomalies and still provide the hotel with a sufficiently reliable picture to make decisions. That is also why the success of an RFID project should not be measured by the number of tags installed or scanners deployed. Those are simply input mechanisms.
Recognize its capabilities
The more interesting measures come afterwards. Did the hotel reduce the amount of stock required to operate safely? Did laundry discrepancies become easier to resolve? Did housekeeping spend less time counting? Did purchasing become more predictable? Did losses decrease? Did the hotel identify shortages before they happened?
If the answer to those questions is no, then having an excellent RFID infrastructure is of limited consolation. RFID is an enabler, and a very powerful one. But hotels don’t create value by reading chips. They create value by making better decisions with the information those chips provide.
It’s where textile tracking ends and textile management begins.
The prevailing model
Across much of Europe, hotels no longer own their linen. They rent it from their laundry provider. It is an attractive model. The hotel avoids purchasing and replacing large textile inventories, while the laundry takes responsibility for supplying, washing and maintaining them.
Consequence
However, when using this model, one can ask the question: if the hotel doesn’t own the linen, why should it bother managing it? The hotel may have outsourced the ownership of the textiles, but it has not outsourced the consequences of not having it available.
Housekeeping issues
A room still needs clean sheets before it can be sold. Housekeeping still needs towels on the right floor when rooms are being serviced. Shortages still create emergency calls, additional movements, delays and frustration. Ultimately, it is the hotel, not the owner of the linen, that needs the right articles, in the right quantities, at the right time.
Efficiency
Suppose a 300-room hotel can operate comfortably with 10,000 towels, circulating efficiently between the property and its laundry. If inefficient circulation means that 12,000 are required to provide exactly the same service, the fact that the additional 2,000 belong to somebody else does not make their cost disappear.
Cost
Someone has purchased the towels. They occupy space. They are transported, handled and washed. They require financing and eventually replacement. Sooner or later, those costs form part of the economics of the laundry service.
This does not mean that laundries deliberately operate inefficiently. Far from it.
Different objectives
A good laundry has every reason to run an efficient industrial operation. But the objectives of the two businesses are not identical. The laundry needs to process textiles efficiently. The hotel needs to ensure availability efficiently.
That distinction matters.
Responsibility
Control of rental linen should not be confused with controlling the laundry. It is not about surveillance, nor determining who is responsible each time a towel disappears. Better information actually improves the relationship and answers important questions. How much left the hotel and how quickly was it returned; is there sufficient stock in circulation, where are shortages developing and are both parties operating within the service levels they agreed.
Poor alternative
The alternative is to manage availability through buffers. If nobody really knows how efficiently linen is circulating, the safest solution is simply to have more of it in the system. That works. But safety stock has a cost, irrespective of who technically owns it.
Control
Hotels routinely outsource important parts of their operations. However, that does not mean giving up control. A hotel using an external housekeeping company still measures room readiness and cleaning quality. A hotel doesn’t stop monitoring energy consumption because the electricity comes from somebody else’s power station.
The bottom line
Linen should be no different. Whether textiles are owned, rented or managed under some hybrid arrangement is a commercial decision. Whether the hotel understands how effectively those textiles support its operation is a management decision. The two should not be confused.
You can outsource linen. You cannot outsource linen availability.
A Major Shift
In 2021, a survey of 13,000 US hospitality workers revealed that half of them wouldn’t return to their previous roles, with a third planning to leave the industry entirely for better opportunities.
Continued Struggles
By 2024, the global hospitality sector has significantly rebounded due to an increase in both leisure and business travel. However, the recovery remains incomplete, and many hotels continue to struggle with hiring and retaining staff. Despite increasing wages, offering more flexible hours, and expanding benefits, the industry still finds it challenging to address these issues.
Impact on Operations
A recent report from the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) highlights this problem, showing that 67% of surveyed US hotels are experiencing staffing shortages, with 12% describing their situation as “severely understaffed,” which affects their operational capabilities. The primary challenge for hoteliers remains meeting rising guest expectations and delivering high-quality customer experiences despite ongoing staffing shortages.
Innovation
To tackle this persistent issue, hotels are turning to technological innovation. Fides by LossLess Group offers a solution by helping hotels address labor challenges. This cloud-based SaaS ecosystem automates textile management processes, significantly reducing the need for human involvement. It also enhances the productivity of housekeeping staff, further improving overall operational efficiency.